Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Open Source just a giant plagiarizing machine with more genial licensing conventions?

AI is as good a time as any to re-assess how we feel on intellectual property, but I don't think we can get any more restrictive without suffocating innovation. Plagiarism is how patent trolls shut down otherwise innovative products, and it's the basis for jacking up non-generic drug prices and forcing developers to pay licensing fees just to use an OS. If anything, our current preconception of plagiarism is too unclear and fragile, bound to be destroyed by whatever the hell AI is, if it even matters in the first place.

View on HN

There's a difference between opensource and proprietary works. For example, I use "PouchDB" in some of my apps and their code is opensource, but what I make with it is not opensource.

It's one thing to make something similar, and there are often more ways than one to do that, but how would one know if AI created something unique or just copied some human's copyrighted work and presented it in a response?

TBH, I have not dug into how it works, but I did ask it to show me how to make something with PouchDB.js and it looked like it was pretty much a copy and paste from their website. That is not really an issue, but it did not attribute that code to Pouchdb.com. And, to be fair, I did not ask where it got it. But it seems to me that if they got it off the PouchDB.com web site it should tell us and provide a link to the original source.

> how would one know if AI created something unique or just copied some human's copyrighted work and presented it in a response?

You can't. Similarly, when a human writes original code, we can't be certain that they're not repeating stuff they've seen before too. We don't think of things in terms of license, no human remembers the fast inverse square root function or cocktail sort for the license it had. At no point can I be certain that I'm not unconsciously plagarizing proprietary code from a previous job. Sometimes it's essential (I have to plagiarize "set euo pipefail").

There is indeed some nuance to AI creating supposedly-novel works, but I don't think it's as great as people think. AI makes the process of building a derivative work easier, which is probably frustrating as a license-holder. Many forms of derivative works have legal precedent though, like Wine, DXVK, OpenJDK or the Dolphin emulator - it's an open-source implementation of a proprietary API. You can fly pretty close to the sun without getting burned in many of these cases, as long as you don't violate fair use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com